Austin Cowan had expected a quiet year.
The headhunter, who helps Fortune 100 companies find and attract cybersecurity executives, knew that the markets were choppy and that corporate honchos were mulling how artificial intelligence might upend their businesses.
But Heidrick & Struggles, the white glove executive talent firm where Mr. Cowan works, has been deluged in recent months with requests to find executives who have experience responding to security breaches and protecting data, along with the technical know-how to review code.
“Roles that typically come along every 12 months, we’re seeing those roles come along every week,” Mr. Cowan said. “I think it’s driven by fear and uncertainty in this A.I. arms race.”
As A.I. upends jobs — particularly in Silicon Valley — the risks and pitfalls associated with the technology have helped fuel a new wave of hiring for cybersecurity experts.
Demand is so fierce that some search firms have said they are turning away clients, partly because there are too few qualified candidates to go around. Cybersecurity job postings in the first quarter were up 11 percent from a year earlier, according to Glassdoor, a job search platform.
Hiring of security experts has surged as tech workers increasingly use A.I. to generate code, sometimes introducing bugs and vulnerabilities in the process. And leading A.I. labs have warned that their latest technologies, like Anthropic’s Mythos model, could be used to find and exploit software vulnerabilities. That would make it easier to hack into companies’ infrastructure.
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